Interview with Prerna Pant, General Manager at Circus Social, a social listening and analysis company based in Singapore.

Hi Prerna, what is your background and what is included in your current role at Circus Social?

You could describe me as a storyteller; I started telling stories for brands very early in my career – and I have continued to do so till today. I’m a Co-Founder and General Manager at Circus Social. My role includes business development, operations, marketing and client management – and spans across all our products and offerings.

What differs Circus Social from other media intelligence companies in APAC?

To start with – we’re a company that was built ground up by marketers, for marketers. Too often we find that solutions are made for marketers by those who have not walked in those shoes before – and we wanted to change that. Secondly, we’re an Asia-first martech company. We were born and bred in Asia – meaning that we specialize in the APAC region in terms of language, sentiment, source and local coverage throughout the region, including Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Japan, Korea and more, and have a local grasp on culture and online behavior.

What are your greatest challenges ahead at Circus Social when it comes to serving your customer analysis and developing your offer?

I think we face many of the same challenges that our competitors face in terms of data access, features and innovation. But personally – I believe the biggest challenge for us lies in increasing access to the world of digital intelligence – and taking it from the marketers’ ecosystem to the entire organization.

If any, what specific needs are there in your region for media intelligence that you think may differ from the rest of the world?

The greatest one is localization; this goes far beyond just language and platforms. The way in which consumers share product reviews on Pantip in Thailand is massively different from how Koreans behave on Naver, and it is the job of digital intelligence companies to identify and capitalize on this for our clients.

Do you find the region diverse in the sense that it is challenging to offer comprehensive products and services throughout the region? If so, in what way?

Each market comes with its own challenges, but I think that’s what makes it more exciting to work in this region. We have to keep learning, keep innovating and continue to challenge the status quo in each market. The initial entry into each market is typically the one we have to get right first, and once the foundation has been laid, it’s essential that we don’t drop the ball and continue to offer solutions that match the needs and nuances of each market.

Can you provide a specific example where one (or more) of your clients has made changes based on the insights or analysis you provided them?

There are many capabilities that our platform, 20/Twenty, provides, ranging from crisis monitoring and campaign tracking, to consumer behavior and insights. I’ve found that getting that right from the very beginning and being a partner to your clients instead of being a service provider is what makes that difference.

We’ve worked with automobile brands that found that crisis situations were growing differently on social platforms vs. media sources – identified through custom features on 20/Twenty that allow you to track trending content by source type, spikes in conversations and specialized data tagging – and hence, they could easily measure actions and address problems once discovering this.

In a completely different setting, we helped an Asian supermarket understand why ‘mommy shoppers’ were declining rapidly through social listening on parenting forums and review sites. The main reason was that the width of the aisles in their grocery stores was too narrow to fit a pram – and hence aggravated mothers were dissuading others from shopping at their outlets.

The applications are obviously endless – it’s about getting to the insights quickly and more effectively.

Have you recently, or are you about to, release any new technology-based solutions that will add on to or improve services you offer your clients? If so, what solutions, and how will your customers benefit from them?

We have a lot of exciting features from a tech standpoint that will position us to be the leaders in viral content predictability and influencer identification. These are based on client requests and feedback, as is much of our tech roadmap.

When it comes to licensing content for media monitoring in your region, which countries are the most progressive and which are lagging behind?

Although we see this changing rapidly, markets such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia are certainly more comfortable and advanced with licensing data properly. This is feeding into other markets, such as Myanmar and Vietnam very quickly, and with early adopters setting the standard that new markets can follow.

Which social platforms are the most important to your clients, and which ones do you see as having the most potential in the future when it comes to gathering relevant information for your customers?

The importance of platforms changes by client, use case and industry; however, I also truly believe that you can’t ignore any of them today as conversations and people are very interlinked. For example, if your use case is reputation management – you must realize that a crisis can break anywhere, anytime. Similarly, I also always tell my clients that campaign periods aren’t the only time that consumers talk about you – it’s important to be ‘always on.’

When it comes to the actual data behind the media intelligence you do, what kind of data or media that you don’t currently use for media intelligence today, can be interesting in the future?

Expanding on image and video recognition and applying that to a variety of platforms is certainly interesting for us. We also see great potential in audience segmentation and predictive technology.

Catching up with friends, finding a soulmate, researching products and shopping, complaining about the things they hate – people are integrating digital into every aspect of their lives. According to We are Social’s Digital in 2018 report, Asia Pacific is home to over 2 billion internet users – and growing rapidly. The number of social media users across the region has grown 14% to roughly 1.7 billion users. Given the continued growth of active social media users, brands must do everything they can to understand the digital behavior of their customers and be proactive with their marketing strategies.

What is Social Media Listening?

Social media listening, also known as social media monitoring or social media intelligence is the process of monitoring specific brand terms, products, competitors or themes and categories that are important to your business. This serves as a valuable tool that can be used to provide a deeper understanding of what’s being said about your brand, your products, your competitors, your category as well as provide actionable insights that can be incorporated into your digital marketing strategy.,

Why you should be Tracking Social

Learn More about your Audience

In order to successfully reach your target audience, you must first know where to find them. Social listening allows brands to find out which social media channels have the highest number of related mentions so that brands can focus their time and effort on the right channel.

Track Campaign Performance

Brands are often worried that their campaigns are not resonating with their customers. Social listening allows brands to track their campaigns so that they are able to see consumer conversations happening in real time on social media.

Depending on consumer reactions to specific campaigns, brands can adapt and make the necessary changes dynamically to ensure a more successful outcome based on objectives.

Build Stronger Relationships with your Customers

With the advent of social media, consumers are increasingly utilizing it as a platform to voice their issues and complaints (for example, product reviews or posts on a brand’s Facebook page if they are experiencing a problem).

A “listening ear” on the ground increases a brands awareness of issues surrounding their products or services. Identifying customer pain points allows brands to adjust their customer service, product or messaging – resulting in a better experience for their customers.

Tracking and Benchmarking Competitors

Knowing your enemy is half the battle won. Social listening helps brands know what people are saying about their competitors online. This allows you to leverage any weaknesses that your competitors are having or develop timely responses to any competitor campaigns that are going viral. You can also benchmark your page, brand or campaign performance with competitors, and identify opportunities for growth.

Crisis Management and Prevention

Managing crisis situations swiftly and decisively is of utmost importance. Social listening allows you to set real time alerts to receive warning of any negative sentiment around your brand. This gives you the ability to identify detractor posts and respond quickly – ensuring minimal damage to the brand.

This early warning system also affords you the maximum amount of time needed to implement contingency plans, if required.

Getting started on your Social Listening Journey

Now that you are ready to start listening, you will need a dedicated social listening platform.

At Circus Social – we are leaders in the digital intelligence space, empowering brands with real-time insights through our social & news monitoring platform, 20/Twenty.What clients love about 20/Twenty:

– Easy, intuitive design, providing full image & video tracking

– Asian language support including 140 languages across more than 40 countries

– Offline & online news tracking with Dow Jones Factiva

– The ability to track customer intent including leads and decision-making behaviour

I was at a Business School today to attend an event and met a few people from the industry. Here is an interesting conversation I had with somebody I met. Let’s call him Mr. X.

Mr. X – So what do you do?
Ram – I am an entrepreneur and run a software product company called Circus Social. We do social media monitoring and analytics; and have offices in Singapore and Bangalore.

Mr. X – What exactly is social media monitoring?
Ram – In simple terms, we fetch data, and a lot of it, from multiple social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit etc. and also from several blogs, forums and news sites. We then process and augment this data (with sentiment, gender, removing spam etc) and allow marketers to get insights from this data. We show them trends, insights, a lot of charts and graphs and allow them to make better business decisions.

Mr. X – So you are a big data company. Sounds like tough work. What kind of business decisions can be made?
Ram – Yes, we are indeed a big data company. Currently, our clients are enterprises, typically marketers, who would like to know their customers better, research their markets, analyse their competitors, identify top influencers, get real time alerts on topics of interest etc. We are also launching our SME product shortly.

Mr. X – So, do you invade people’s privacy? Isn’t this data private?
Ram – We only crawl data that is already publicly available. Anything that is private or protected by you is completely out of bounds for us. We do an incredibly good job of collating all of this data in our platform and marketers find tremendous value in quickly viewing trends from 10,000 feet but also in the ability to drill down to understand the “why” and “how” behind the trends.

Mr. X – Will this be useful for my company?
Ram – If people are talking about your company, your brands or topics that you are interested in tracking, you will definitely find it useful.

Mr. X – Where can I get more information?
Ram – Here’s my business card. Please visit our website https://www.circussocial.com where you can find a lot more information about what we do and a list of some of our clients. You can also sign-up for a free demo.

Get the pulse of your audience straight to your inbox!

A week ago, we announced an important update to our platform, 20/Twenty. We’re now offering automated Sentiment Reports straight to our clients’ email inboxes, whenever they want them, daily or weekly.

We’ve brought the power of our enhanced sentiment analysis to automated reports to further benefit our clients.

Today, we’d like to explain more on sentiment analysis.

What is it?

Sentiment analysis is the process of assigning emotional meaning to media mentions. This would then allow you to understand the attitudes held by different consumers towards your product, campaign, or brand. For example, a higher percentage of mentions marked positive than negative or neutral would allow you to understand this as a majorly positive reception. Equipped with this information, you would be able to make better, more accurate marketing decisions, quicker.

Why do Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment Analysis and application on the 20/Twenty platform allows you to take a large volume of online mentions and process it for sentiment accurately in a much quicker time than a human could manually. With this information, you can consider your brand’s positioning and what the next steps are that you need to take to make yourselves more favorable to consumers.

You can also do a comparison between sentiments on different platforms or over a period of time to gauge the reception to your advertising campaign. On our platform, information comes in real-time so that you can monitor ongoing campaigns as they are being executed too. Combined with our real-time alerts, we’ve enabled our clients to get feedback so they have the chance to make tweaks to their strategy, even if they’re on the ground.

Why are Circus Social’s Sentiment Reports are a must-have for any marketer?

Our report gives marketers an easy way of understanding the changes in brand sentiment day to day with hourly information. Importantly, we’ve included what every marketer would want to know in our automated reports- sentiment changes over time, top positive and negative keywords/topics, sentiments segmented by gender, amongst a ton of other configuration options.

While crises may certainly sway public sentiments towards negative, they rarely happen daily. Sentiment Analysis allows you to keep an eye on your brand’s progress over a period of time, a task that may be exhausting but is definitely worthwhile and necessary in the speed of conversations taking place today.

What are some of the other things you can do with our reports?

Gauge responses to and mentions of your brand in real-time

Quickly analyse sentiments around your offline-events as well as online campaigns

Understand opinions, attitudes, and emotions of customers

Identify and keep a track of the most impactful social and news posts

Research upcoming trends in your industry

Learn more about your competitors

Our Sentiment Analysis Report aims to help you integrate a deep understanding of audience responses with your marketing so that you make better decisions.

After all, great strategy comes from research and a deep understanding of the shifts in your audience’s perceptions of your brand.

If you’re interested in learning more about sentiment analysis, or how we could help your brand track what your audience is really feeling about you, do drop us a mail at info@circussocial.com. We’re more than happy to help you get a feel of sentiment analysis. 😁

Reach to Revenue, a Webinar on Social ROI

Earlier today, our Co-Founder & COO, Prerna Pant, spoke at a webinar with Alison Ng (Regional Account Executive at Hootsuite APAC) and Meredith Wallace (Head of Social & Digital at M&C Saatchi). These three accomplished women discussed how to measure and prove the value of your investment in social.

If you missed it, don’t worry. Here’s a quick ten-pointer list of what was talked about!

What did we learn about Social ROI from the talk?

1. According to a dipstick survey, 66% of respondents currently do not measure Social ROI.

2. 42% of respondents are unsure how to go about measuring and proving Social ROI.

3. Measuring social ROI can help to make or save money, or mitigate risk. Or better yet, all three at once.

4. Use the 3-step framework for simplicity:

5. Not all Social ROI is created equal. Not every single metric like the number of followers could be important to you.

6. Proving Social ROI is not one-off, it changes day to day.

7. Be flexible! Change your approach based on results and insights as needed.

8. Customer-centric is not a buzzword, it’s integral to social and digital success.

9. Look at Social ROI from beyond a sales perspective, but as a way to find customer insights.

10. Always contextualize data. Half the battle is asking the right questions.

We hope that was a useful list!

If you have any other questions about Social ROI, don’t hesitate to tweet us @CircusSocial or leave a comment below.

Join Circus Social at this year’s Echelon Asia Summit!

Held annually since 2009, Echelon is a digital platform that attracts over 6,000 industry leaders and professionals, specifically for start-ups. This year’s Echelon Asia Summit promises to be an exciting, information-sharing conference where you will get to hear from fellow professionals and experts across the region. As Official Social Listening Partner, Circus Social will be attending the two-day conference from 28th to 29th in Singapore.

Prerna Pant, Speaker at Echelon Asia Summit 2017

Here’s our Co-Founder and COO, Prerna Pant, at the previous Echelon Thailand conference. Prerna will be taking the stage at Echelon Asia Summit 2017 again to share her insights on social media intelligence. Voted one of Singapore’s favourite female entrepreneurs, Prerna will be discussing how social media data can be leveraged for businesses.

As the Official Social Listening Partner, at Echelon Thailand 2017, Circus Social powered real-time event tracking and social monitoring at the 2 day conference at Bangkok – from the 15th to the 16th of May.

What did we get up to while we were there?

The Circus Command Centre

We showcased our platform, 20/Twenty and the powerful Circus Command Centre which allowed for effective real-time event tracking and the display of online mentions in the form of strong visuals to attendees. Our Circus Command Centre displayed the most used hashtags and buzzwords during the event as well as the most engaged-with posts. Posts with the Echelon event mentions would be showcased on the Command Centre Screens in real-time, informing viewers of the top trending content around the event – across Social & News.

With the help of 20/Twenty, we could actively track and monitor mentions of the event in real-time; what people were saying about various workshops, talks, and other start-ups, and how much engagement (likes, retweets, or shares) any post received.

During the speaker session in the afternoon, our COO and Co-Founder, Prerna Pant, shared on how brands can use social media data beyond simply crisis management, event tracking and how social listening is crucial across various business verticals as well as business sizes – SME’s as well as larger corporates.

Aside from nipping potential PR crises in the bud, social listening allows brands to do more than just monitor media. They could also draw insights from existing social media data too.

Here’s a snippet from the talk: “Social listening lets you find additional and unexpected branding and content opportunities. You may get inspired by an industry piece, or find an angle from user-generated organic content that you hadn’t considered before.”

Echelon Thailand might be over but we all know that the social media cycle never stops. Circus Social is excited to share an exclusive offer that could help your business get a quick taste of real-time monitoring and see what social media intelligence can do for your business strategies whether it is to do with content development, product decisions, media spends or simply PR management.

CIRCUS SOCIAL IS COMING TO THIS YEAR’S MUCH ANTICIPATED ECHELON THAILAND 2017!

The Echelon Thailand 2017 conference is set to attract and engage over 1,500 industry leaders and professionals across Asia Pacific this year as well as feature a plethora of startups, investor groups, punctuated with power-packed events and exciting workshops.

This conference to be held over 2 days, the 15th and 16th of May, will see live speakers and professionals from across APAC, sharing their experiences, business stories, knowledge and insights into their businesses and key topics of interest.

Join us at Echelon Thailand and be a part of this amazing journey and hear about how social media listening can help grow your business! Register today and avail 30% off passes with our exclusive coupon code!

Prerna Pant, our Co-Founder and COO here at Circus Social, will be taking the stage at Echelon Thailand 2017! Voted one of Singapore’s top female entrepreneurs, she will share insights into how to utilize Social Intelligence and how digital analytics is shaping marketing strategy today!